The Most Hated Man in Television

* You know how Zoraida and Rob pranked me by flipping off the prompter before my anti-weather-hype diatribe? This is how I retaliated…

Cruel, I know. But I had to teach them a lesson.

* I’ve been spending considerable amounts of time at home downloading, editing and uploading video from my show to YouTube. I do this to promote the show. We have a lot of fun on the mornings, but we can always use a bigger audience. That’s why I’m trying to go viral. But over the weekend, when I added links to these videos on NBCChicago.com, I got rapped on the knuckles.

Let’s flash back for a moment. When NBCChicago.com rolled out, one of our Web Czars told us explicitly, it doesn’t matter where you link, so long as people search our page for it. I guess the goal was to become THE news hub for young adults.

What’s more, a different Web Czar told me we were moving away from promoting the station on NBCChicago.com. That’s why we weren’t going to be too keen on posting videos to the site. Still, some of our station’s videos end up online. Nothing from the mornings, though. I think winning an Emmy is a prerequisite to getting a video posted, and the golden lady is a fickle mistress, indeed.

Despite the prior decrees from the Web Hegemony, the more important “Powers That Be” say they want internal page views, meaning they want people to come to NBCChicago.com and stay on NBCChicago.com. Cool. I get it. So let’s add some cool content. Where shall we find this cool content? How about the stuff we generate every morning?

I’m just baffled as to our web strategy. Either we’re trying to grab eyeballs or redirect them. Either our station is related to the site or it isn’t. No one knows. But if we wanted to keep eyes on the site, it would make sense to put something like this blog on the site proper, rather than on WordPress, where it currently resides. Never mind. I’ll just sit here confused until someone picks a direction for us to run.

* Yes, I just used the word “hegemony” for the first time since college.

* Looks like the Tribune is going under. This morning, when Kim did her live shot on the story, she stood on our plaza with a graphic beneath her that said “possible bankruptcy.” In the shot, along with the Tribune building, you could also see Studio 5 behind her. A harbinger of things to come?

* Today, Andy frequently referred to an incoming “rain event,” or as we in Normal World call it, “rain.”

* While men are freaking out, teens’ self-esteem is too high. So let me get this straight: Teenagers think they’re awesome, and then they get older and start thinking they suck? Now that I think about it, that’s about right. Every day that goes by, my opinion of myself is lowered.

I’m sick of all this coddling. Kids can’t play “Tag” because schools are afraid of a lawsuit. Everyone gets a trophy. No one keeps score. This is only creating a generation of fragile whiners. What are you going to do when you get into the real world and someone kicks you down a peg? Are you going to cry about it? Or are you going to ball your little hand into a fist and swing back?

All of these things do a disservice to children. Kids need to learn that the world doesn’t revolve around them. They need to have their hearts broken and their knees skinned. They need to learn how to lose. They need to learn tolerance when someone expresses (gasp!) a different opinion or belief. In our efforts not to offend, we’re wrecking these kids. It’s like we’re trying to conform them into some sort of pre-packaged, bland, centrist automatons.

When I was in high school, Suzanne Toledo was in my gym class. Suzanne was an incredible swimmer who placed Top 6 in the world in the Goodwill Games while she was still a teenager. And when it came time to swim in gym class, our teacher was nice enough to grade our swim times on a curve. Suzanne got an “A.” The second-best kid got a “C.” I’m sure I got an “H” (or as they called them back in my day, an “F.”)

That taught me to deal with the fact that sometimes, someone is far, far better than me. For example, everyone is a better ice skater than I am. I have zero balance. I look like a wounded giraffe on roller skates speeding through an oil slick. I recognize that I suck at ice skating. And I’m fine with that… because I have learned to cultivate other talents, like becoming the greatest writer of my generation. And I owe it all to the thorough butt-whipping doled out by Suzanne “The Torpedo” Toledo.